Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-30-Speech-4-021"
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"en.20030130.1.4-021"2
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"Mr President, at the present time, of the 6 billion inhabitants of the world, over 800 million are suffering from malnutrition. Yet three quarters of those people are rural people, in other words the very people whose job it is to provide not only their own food but also that of their fellow citizens. Those 600 million poor farmers are not in a position to feed themselves or to feed others like them because they are the direct victims of the lowering of farm prices dictated by trade liberalisation. All they can do is to cut off their internal-consumption reserves permanently in order to try and save, more often than not without success, their production potential.
How can we release them from this vicious circle? We can do so by adopting a new approach to the globalisation of trade in agricultural and food products, at the heart of which should lie the recognition of the principle of food sovereignty. According to this principle, each country or group of countries should be free to determine how it supplies its people with food. Food sovereignty means the recognition of people’s right to feed themselves and their right to feed themselves as they want to. It means the opportunity for developing countries to achieve food autonomy by developing their agriculture. It is not enough to declare that developing countries have the right to develop their food crops: it is also essential that the rules governing international trade in agricultural products do not prohibit them from doing so in practice. We must have clearer recognition of the fact that these countries have the right to protect their farmers and to open up their markets selectively, as Europe itself did in order to end its food dependency.
The countries which have been most successful in reducing famine are those where responsible governments have been able, thanks to policies which support farm prices and subsidies paid for those setting up in farming and for infrastructures, to allow their farmers to have access to their own internal markets, thereby increasing their purchasing power and their productivity, and consequently their production. If we want to tackle the problem of hunger seriously, therefore, it is urgently necessary to stop reducing agricultural prices: access for peasant farmers to a profitable local market is the first requirement for the growth of agricultural production, which is itself the key to reducing hunger. The total and uncontrolled liberalisation of trade in agricultural products is not in the interests of hungry countries; it is in the interests of countries which are structurally exporters of agricultural products, but it ruins poor farmers in developing countries. There is no sense in trying to have direct competition between the small farmer in Chad and the big farmer in Minnesota, or between the shepherds of the Andes and the latifundia of New Zealand.
If, then, the European Union wants to make an effective contribution to reducing hunger in the world, it will have to be particularly vigilant with regard to three essential points. Firstly, the agricultural development programmes that it is financing in the developing countries will all have to include a section that provides aid for the marketing of food products. Secondly, the European Union will have to assist the developing countries or groups of countries which have similar production costs to protect their internal markets against world-market dumping prices, with the aid of instruments without which their producers will be ruined. Thirdly, the European Union will also, at last, have to use all its influence in international trade negotiations, so as to ensure the recognition of the right to agricultural exemption, in other words the right of nations to protect their farmers, who feed them and whose prosperity governs their development."@en1
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